Caveman Valentines: The French Connection, Dirty Harry, & Straw Dogs

William Friedkin’s The French Connection, about ruthless cops chasing ruthless drug smugglers, is a sensationally effective and vastly overrated movie, and I doubt I’ll ever want or need to see it again.

Even on first viewing—as a movie-crazed teenager in 1986, courtesy of VHS—its slot in the pantheon of great ’70s movies struck me as unearned. I dug its unglamorous violence, grubby locations, energetic camerawork and superb lead performances (by Gene Hackman as volatile NYPD detective Popeye Doyle, Roy Scheider as his level-headed partner, Frederic de Pasquale as the chief smuggler and Tony Lo Bianco as his Brooklyn contact). But the film—now playing in a new 35mm print August 31-Sept. 6 at Film Forum—struck me as very calculating, not in a Hitchcock/Spielberg way (i.e., perfectionist, hermetic, mechanical) but in the manner of a street hood who stages a distraction so his partner can snatch a purse. The average Adam Sandler comedy has more integrity than Friedkin’s Oscar winner, which lovingly protracted scenes of police brutality for left-wingers, pre-Miranda-ruling nostalgia and tangible law enforcement results for right-wingers, and an ending that makes hash of both positions—not to complicate viewers’ reactions, but to provide rhetorical cover to the filmmakers no matter who gripes. How could such a pandering film be described as uncompromising?

Adapted by Ernest Tidyman (Shaft) from Robin Moore’s book about New York cops seizing $32 million in heroin from a French smuggling ring, The French Connection was widely hailed as an aesthetically fresh, socially relevant new entry in the cops-and-robbers genre. It was lumped together with two other 1971 touchstones, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs, as an example of the new fascist populism—a subgenre that combined studio production values and exploitation tactics. Friedkin’s film is the least of the three because it’s got almost nothing on its mind but rattling the audience. It’s a roller coaster ride posing as something more substantial—or, God forbid, Important—but doesn’t have the stones to be that thing. The Siegel and Peckinpah films remain morally, politically and aesthetically problematic, but they aim higher than The French Connection; they’re explorations of the attraction-repulsion principle, at once seductive and self-examining. There’s a context for the movies’ viciousness; they are fully thought-out and fully felt. To quote The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak, “I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” That’s more than can be said for The French Connection, the movie equivalent of a bad cop who exits an interview room with blood on his shirt, crowing about his keen interrogation skills.

Straw Dogs—starring Dustin Hoffman as a mathematician named David who moves to his wife’s Cornish hometown only to be harassed by local goons, one of whom is his wife’s former lover—is about man’s quest to identify himself as masculine through the self-actualizing power of violence. It’s half full of shit; Peckinpah was incapable of mounting a sustained critique of machismo because he couldn’t resist kissing its feet. But its self-aware aspects complicate and justify the rest. Peckinpah reveals the primitive fantasies buried within supposedly civilized people—the intellectual man’s deep-down fear that he’s not really a man until he’s spilled blood to defend women and property (practically the same thing in Peckinpah’s universe). Peckinpah’s honesty comes through in the way he implicates himself in David’s bloodlust. The movie doesn’t say, “Here’s the dirty truth about you people,” but rather, “Look into my eyes, then tell me you don’t see yourself”—a distinction that separates hacks from artists. The movie’s ultimate endorsement of purification-through-savagery (boldfaced in a climactic close-up of a home invader’s leg getting chomped by one of David’s bear traps) is questionable to laughable; but it’s visualized without evasions or qualifiers, and the film’s characters are more psychologically complex than their thumbnail descriptions might suggest. (The still-notorious rape of David’s wife Amy, played by Susan George, does in fact depict a woman resisting a rapist and then succumbing to pleasure; but the rapist is her ex-lover, and when he’s done, and his friend assaults her, too, she is utterly horrified.) All these qualities make Straw Dogs disturbing and still worth arguing about.

Dirty Harry is slicker and and more simplistic, but it has a crude honesty that Friedkin’s film rarely musters. The movie’s straightforward, pre-Miranda definition of good police work is laid out in the scene where its snarling martyr hero explains the origin of his nickname: “Any dirty job that comes along.” He’s the police department’s pit bull; one Harry poster’s tag line promised, “You don’t assign him to murder cases…You just turn him loose!” The iconic image of Harry tossing his police ID in the mud after killing Scorpio was interpreted by many critics (and later, film historians) as a kind of mea culpa—an admission that Harry has besmirched his sworn duty to uphold the law but has enough self-awareness to realize it and enough decency to admit it in a gesture. I used to buy that reading, but I don’t anymore; it’s fundamentally at odds not just with Harry’s character, but with the movie, which ennobles and validates Harry at every turn. The film’s script stacks the deck in Harry’s favor whenever his tactics are called into question. When a superior reminds him that he was disciplined for shooting a rape suspect without first proving his intent, Harry says, “When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross.” There is not now, and never has been, a city or town anywhere in America where a cop would be disciplined for shooting someone fitting that description. That scene’s straw-man approach to vindicating Harry’s moral certitude is replicated on a grander scale in any scene that involves Scorpio, a cackling, effete, ransom-seeking beast who shoots citizens at random (but especially hates cops, blacks and priests—a trifecta of targets designed to make him loathsome to pretty much everyone).

Scorpio has a knack for political jiu-jitsu, a trait that raises him above a standard-issue psycho and makes him a law-and-order bogeyman. He turns society’s relatively recent commitment to protecting suspects’ constitutional rights (U.S. vs. Miranda was handed down in 1966) against it; and he carries out his campaign of terror in a left-leaning U.S. city that Nixon-era heartland conservatives considered even more deviant and debauched than New York. (Just desserts.) In the script’s lefty-baiting show-stopper, Scorpio hires a black thug to beat him up, then goes on the local news claiming Harry did it. Message: criminals don’t just deserve to be beaten by cops, they expect it, and since they’re going to falsely claim police brutality anyway, they can be roughed up with a clear conscience. (“I didn’t beat him up,” Harry snarls. “He looks too good.”) Harry’s lonely quest for true justice (pursued even after his superiors take him off the case) defines social liberals as enablers of bug-eyed mass murderers. The movie is asking, “Do you really want to protect this scumbag’s rights?”—a question that has to be answered “No” because we’ve seen objective proof that Scorpio is a sniveling, hateful freak, a bug fit for squashing. There’s no way that Harry wouldn’t believe he did the right and necessary thing. When he chucks his police ID, he’s not censuring himself, he’s divorcing himself from the compromised institutions he once was proud to represent. His sullen walk-out (magically erased in the sequels) expressed Vietnam-era conservatives’ overpowering feelings of alienation and despair—their pervasive fear that the country they called the United States been taken over by bureaucrats and sissies who prized hippie idealism over common sense. Its cartoon fervor is rooted in political reality. By the film’s logic, Harry hasn’t failed society; society has failed him.

Straw Dogs is morally and philosophically suspect from frame one, Dirty Harry even more so—Pauline Kael’s infamous one-line summary of Straw Dogs, “the first fascist masterpiece” actually fits Siegel’s film better—but like John Milius’ right-wing militia fantasy Red Dawn, both movies are brilliant works of provocation. They have incendiary viewpoints and articulate them with panache. The French Connection says close to nothing while pretending to tell us every manner of harsh truth—which probably explains why it’s the most influential panel in 1971’s caveman triptych.

On on this point, it’s impossible to ignore Kael’s review of the movie, titled “Urban Gothic.” After an introductory section describing how New York lured Hollywood filmmakers with tax breaks, and how Vietnam-and-riot-era filmmakers responded by cranking out exploitation-influenced movies that fed off of the city’s then-ominous seediness, Kael writes that audience were no longer going to “shock and horror films because of a need to exorcise their fears; that’s probably a fable…I think they’re going for entertainment, and I don’t see how one can ignore the fact that the kind of entertainment that attracts them now is often irrational and horrifyingly brutal. A few years ago, The Dirty Dozen turned the audience on so high that there was yelling in the theater and kicking at the seats. And now an extraordinarily well-made thriller gets the audience sky-high and keeps it there—The French Connection, directed by William Friedkin, which is one of the most ’New York’ of all the recent New York movies. it’s also probably the best-made example of what trade reporters sometimes refer to as ’the cinema du zap.’”

Kael was right to call out Friedkin for having no purpose beyond goosing the audience; her coup de grace is her citation of the scene where Popeye and his partner talk to colleagues at an accident scene that’s in the movie mainly so that the director can show us a close-up of the accident victims’ blood-smeared faces. Although she didn’t give Friedkin enough credit for craftsmanship—besides the car chase and the scene where Devereaux evades Popeye on the subway platform, the film is filled with absorbing lesser setpieces, including the cops’ early information-gathering visit to a nightclub, the first part of which plays out in documentary-style observational shots, without audible dialogue—she identified the essence of his filmmaking, which was to shock the eyes and ears rather than engage the imagination. “You don’t have to be original or ingenious to work on the audience in this way,” Kael wrote, “you just have to be smart and brutal. The high-pressure methods that one could possibly accept in Z because they were tools used to try to show the audience how a fascist conspiracy works are used as ends in themselves. Despite the dubious methods, the purpose of the brutality in Z was moral—it was to make you hate brutality. Here you love it, you wait for it—that’s all there is.”

Nat Segaloff’s Friedkin biography, Hurricane Billy—excerpted in Film Forum’s press notes—quotes the director recounting his original meeting with Popeye’s real-life inspiration, NYPD detective Eddie Egan, who went on to become a technical adviser for movies and TV shows. “The first week I met Egan, he said to me, ’No matter how long you stay with me or how well you get to know me, you’ll find there’s only three things about me that you need to know: I drink beer, I fuck broads, and I break heads,’” Friedkin said. “He was right. There’s very little else to the guy.’” That Friedkin’s movie adopts the thickheaded mentality of its lead character ultimately seems less clever than underachieving. The movie doesn’t connect Popeye’s viciousness to the culture or the time, or even to the immediate setting, nor does it look beneath Popeye’s hard shell in order to figure out what drove him and tease it out on screen. Siegel and Clint Eastwood did all of these things with Harry Callahan, whose wry sense of humor and widower’s isolation humanize him even as his lethal temperament connects him to a long line of mythic movie gunfighters, detectives and psychopaths. (Like Popeye, Harry is a casual racist, but the emphasis is on “casual”—it’s just a part of his character, and the movie doesn’t use Harry’s bigotry to shock and titillate the audience, as Friedkin does throughout The French Connection.) Siegel’s movie has a person at its center rather than a furious abstraction; that’s part of the reason it can withstand repeat viewings.

“I remember going to Italy when [The French Connection] opened and being told by a group of journalists that it was the most pro-fascist film they’d ever seen,” Friedkin told Nat Segaloff. “That certainly wasn’t my intention. Then I’d come back to America and hear from people like the American Civil Liberties Union that it was really showing the cops for what they were: a bunch of thugs who shouldn’t be let loose with guns, breaking heads. And I thought the film was even-handed.” Being even-handed isn’t the same thing as having no discernible opinion on anything, but the movie doesn’t make that distinction.

Popeye is only worth watching to see what crazy, hateful thing he’ll do next. The movie invites us along on his petty power trips, and it frames his antisocial tendencies—signified by his cruddy little bachelor pad in a housing project, his set-’em-up-and-lay-’em-down attitude towards his casually objectified one-night stand, and his apparent lack of any human warmth—as signs of a Spartan mindset and fodder for male viewers’ fantasy identification. (How much do you want to bet that the women that the real Eddie Egan nailed weren’t one-tenth as young and gorgeous as the one Popeye brings home in the movie?) Popeye is a potentially tragic, fascinating character, but the movie just follows him around as if he were a carnivore in a wildlife documentary. Hackman is a magnetic goon, to be sure, but his Best Actor Oscar seems in retrospect like a poor choice, because the movie gives us no insight into Doyle and Hackman doesn’t really do anything to mitigate that. Michael Mann’s closed-off macho men are much more expressive; so are Peckinpah’s heroes. Another famous Kael putdown, her description of Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Rainman as the equivalent of a musician humping one note on a piano for two hours, could easily apply to Hackman here. He’s one of American movies’ most durable character leads, but I can think of few Hackman performances that are less interesting than his work as Popeye, which consists mainly of scowling, yelling, smirking and chewing gum. (Scheider, playing nursemaid to Hackman’s drama queen manliness, is subtler and more recognizably human; he plays Buddy like a prisoner who got stuck with a crazy cell mate and resolved to make the best of it.)

In the end, what does the movie stand for, and what, if anything, is it saying about cops, drugs, New York, masculinity, movies or anything else? Not much. It’s a hustle. The off-screen gunshot that ends the movie—literally capping the moment where Popeye accidentally and needlessly shoots one of his own colleagues and then keeps going as if he had merely stubbed his toe—epitomizes the film’s smash-and-grab attitude toward film technique.

“If they’re talking about what something means in a movie, usually you’ve got a movie that people will want to see,” Segaloff quotes Friedkin telling the American Film Institute in 1974. “Example: the obelisk in 2001. People went around for years sitting around McDonald’s, cocktail parties in Bel Air, saying, ’What the hell is the obelisk?’ And that’s why I put the gunshot at the end of The French Connection. It simply means that the movie ends with a bang. That’s all. It wasn’t in any script and I did it in the dubbing room on the day before I left as a kind of a joke. I said, ’Let’s put a gunshot in the exchange.’ So we stuck it in there and just let it go.”

This is an astonishing quote. Friedkin comes right out and admits that he aped the conventions of ambiguous ’60s and ’70s movies (including intentionally muddled plotting, a tactic that led Mad magazine to title its parody of the movie, What’s the Connection??!?) not because they necessarily suited the material, but because that’s what was fashionable at the time. It’s the sort of film that doesn’t say to the audience, “Draw your own conclusions,” but rather, “What would you like me to be saying?” The French Connection’s transparent wish to be all things to all people, at such pace and volume that you don’t notice that the director is a one-man focus group, makes it one of the most influential movies of the ’70s—and not in a good way.

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This article nails it. We didn't connect TFC to Straw Dogs, but did start talking about it in relation to Dirty Harry almost immediately. Harry is flawed but it's got a lot going on under the hood. After decades of hearing about TFC we were shocked at how shallow and useless it was. What a let down!Posted by Anonymous on 2012-07-07 17:20:23

Well-put for the most part, I believe the French Connection and Gene Hackman';s performance to actually constitute the true definition of overrated. I was shocked to learn this film won multiple Oscars. Plodding, slow, and devoid of characters deeper than a puddle, and yet everywhere one looks the movie has legions of fans--for what? A car chase in which a car chases a train? Popeye could have hopped into a phone booth and called a black and white to head to the next stop--It';s a train, there';s no doubt as to where it';s going, the chase for all the acclaim it gets is boring. At least Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs don';t make you look at the clock and double check the runtimes as your watching them.Posted by Anonymous on 2009-07-23 08:22:02

The French Connection overrated? I doubt it. I guess street life is not dramatic enough for you...that's the real New York, real cops and real life--the whole point of making the movie before Hollywood lost its balls and creativity. The French Connection points to all the grit and spit of street life and international intrigues of post WWII France when the French godfather running drugs to the US for 25 years (prior to the bust in '61) went untouched by the feds and french authorities--why?--because he faught in the French Resistance with Charles de Gaulle.Posted by Rachel on 2008-08-04 07:35:00

Man, Matt, I think you've done Straw Dogs a disservice by lumping it in with Dirty Harry and The French Connection (and yes, I'm like Candyman, only for Sam Peckinpah).

DH & The FC are both about cops willing to disregard the law to reach "justice," or at least a strawman form of it. They're explicitly conservative films about right-headed mavericks bucking a liberal, criminal-coddling state. I mean, I get a little thrill out them, but only to the extent that they're meant to excite the viewer's lizard brains. I don't take them seriously for a freakin' second.

On the other hand, Straw Dogs is about cowardice meeting brutality with the same sort of lawless backdrop as in Peckinpah's great Westerns. No one is supposed to admire or identify with Hoffman's David. His smallness, his cowardice and bullying nature towards his wife, are evident from the first scene of the film. Cornwall, which isn't Amy's hometown, but a place where her wealthy family had a vacation home, is specifically shown as only slightly more civilized than Agua Verde in The Wild Bunch. The Major may represent the law, but his authority only extends so far. Tom Hedden is the real power in Cornwall, and everyone knows it.

Anyway, I don't think we're meant to see David as a hero or as transformed for the better by the siege of the farm, regardless of the marketing campaign. Hoffman may have been the star, but Susan George's Amy is the freakin' hero of the movie, which I know I don't have space or brainpower to prove in these comments. I'm going to point you to Dana Knowles's great analysis of the movie and refutation of the charge of fascism here: http://www.thehighhat.com/Nitrate/002/straw_dogs.html.

I haven't mentioned the rape, but Dana talks about it better than I ever could. I do want to say that the proposed Rod Lurie version sounds preposterous. Lurie may be trying to outliberal Peckinpah (he's threatening to make it more clear that RAPE IS BAD and VIOLENCE IS WRONG, which, uh, yeah, we know), but he's missing the art of the movie. I mean, Peckinpah was a liberal, and Straw Dogs is the work of a liberal who spent his career considering how bad people can be when the law turns its back (or, in Straw Dogs, when the law barely holds a town in check). Platitudes are easy; it takes guts to point out that finding the right thing to do is rarely easy or clear, and people are usually not up to the task due to fear, hate, and petty grievances.

OK, I know no one's probably reading this entry anymore because of its age, so I'm wrapping it up. Just wanted to say that one of these films is not like the others.Posted by Hayden Childs on 2007-09-05 19:01:00

a difference between "FC" and "DH" is the latter's kind of ironic self-reflexivity.For example, when John Vernon's mayor reacts on callahan's militant cop-speech with an amused "he has his standpoints" (or so similarly) or callahan's conversation with his new partner, who has studied sociology:"good for you, if you stay alive"Posted by Anonymous on 2007-09-05 06:12:00

Another terrific piece, Matt. That out-of-print copy of "Straw Dogs" from Criterion ($50.00 on eBay) is looking pretty good right now. Matt, I seem to remember you interviewed Friedkin some years back. Has his attitude toward his picture changed since its 70s release? Does HE view "French Connection" as a unimpeachable classic? Friedkin as a personality alway strikes me as an entirely reasonable, accessable man. I mean, I can actually imagine him agreeing with you, Matt.Posted by Ken Cancelosi on 2007-09-04 08:27:00

Tom: Thanks for mentioning "Bullitt," a good, stylized movie that makes a lot of the same points as "FC" more cogently.

I have to disagree with this, though: "I don't need further psychological insights into Popeye--sometimes a thug is just a thug." I agree with that statement on its face. But when the thug is at the center of a two-hour movie--and he's not unpeeled, onion-like, to reveal more complexities beneath the surface--then I think the movie is a drama that chose the wrong character to focus on, or else needed to be more comedic and less self-important.

"Bad Lieutenant" is a good example, I think, of a hardcase drama that starts and ends with a thug at its center, but slowly invests you in his fate (without apologizing for his scumminess). And Friedkin's own "To Live and Die in LA" seems much more inquisitive about its own Popeye Doyle-type character, William L. Petersen's Chance.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-09-04 06:37:00

I appreciate your points, Matt, but can't help but think you're being a little too hard on "FC." Popeye's banal brutality (and ultimate failure) is the point of the movie, and it's brilliantly presented. I don't need further psychological insights into Popeye--sometimes a thug is just a thug.

It's interesting to contrast FC with "Dirty Harry." (In my book, the political essence of those two films is that every mediocre cop in the country thinks he's Dirty Harry when in reality he's Popeye Doyle.) Another cop movie to include would be "Bullitt," of course. I like it best of the three. It has the more subtle (and realistic) presentation of cops and political authority. Careerist ambition, not political correctness, causes the police administration to hamper the hero as he does his job. That feels about right. Also, note that Bullitt's job--witness protection--is to defend the integrity of the criminal justice system, not to supercede it (DH) or ignore it (FC). It's a kick-ass action movie with a conscience.Posted by Tom on 2007-09-03 12:48:00

Thanks for reminding me to check out "To Live and Die in LA," Matt. It's been years since I've seen it.

I highly recommend to everyone Ellison's film criticism, not nearly as well known as his fiction but extremely trenchant and funny. Here's his summary of The Getaway: "McQueen is sloppy in his acting, Pecinpah is laocoonian in his direction, Quincy Jones's music is banal, Al Lettieri overacts, Sally Struthers underacts, and Ali MacGraw can't act worth shit."Posted by Craig on 2007-09-02 16:22:00

I've thought that Dirty Harry has levels of visual subtext and complexity on themes of religion and guilt that usually get overlooked.Posted by Jeff McMahon on 2007-09-01 22:23:00

That's a persuasive rebuttal, Craig--both from you and from Ellison. Thanks.

I just watched "To Live and Die in L.A." again recently--a film that's very similar to "FC" in a lot of ways, but superior in pretty much every respect--and it has that futility you talk about, along with a much clearer and more conscious grasp of its characters' psychology. I think it's Friedkin's best movie.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-09-01 20:03:00

Found the Ellison quote on Friedkin that I was looking for (from _Harlan Ellison's Watching_): "There is a subterranean river of dark passion rushing wildly in the subtext of all his films--successful and disastrous--that clearly marks him as an artist almost manic with the need to rearrange the received universe in a personal, newly-folded way."

Obviously a minority opinion, but I find myself plugged into it while watching even a genre film like "The French Connection." I would agree with the view that Friedkin is nothing more than an exploitative Neanderthal if his movies didn't frequently undercut that sensibility with the climactic defeat or destruction of his male protagonists. That this often seems to be percolating out of Friedkin's subconscious makes it all the more interesting. I see that gunshot at the end of "The French Connection as Popeye's final act of futility, and the vague reason behind Friedkin's inclusion of it doesn't bother me any more than reading about Bogart not knowing to whom he was nodding or why in the Marseillaise scene during the filming of "Casablanca."

In any case, Matt, thanks for including the picture of Hackman's little wave for your review. That moment always makes me laugh.Posted by Craig on 2007-09-01 18:34:00

Kenji: Yeah, you heard right. Lurie's actually a pretty capable director. The Contender was four-fifths of a good film--up to the point where Joan Allen's character, who hadn't dignified the charges against her to anybody including the viewer, suddenly spills the beans to take us all off the hook, at which point Lurie shifts into Aaron Sorkin mode and the inspirational music becomes unbearable. But he's not particularly challenging or crazy, so I can't imagine him doing anything in the spirit of Peckinpah. Straw Dogs is reprehensible in a lot of ways, but aware of its reprehensibility, and that gives it a still-intriguing energy. It's sort of a confession. I can't see Lurie letting us see his dark heart as Peckinpah did; more likely he'll try to teach lessons, which is not the same thing as being illuminating.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-09-01 16:42:00

It's actually been a while since I last saw The French Connection; last time I saw it, I remember not seeing anything special in it but admiring the heck out of its celebrated car chase. Maybe, after reading this illuminating article, I'll check it out again and see where I stand.

But you're dead-on about Straw Dogs, Matt. As someone who decidedly doesn't share David Sumner's unspoken fear that you're not a real man if you don't act violent, I'm usually inclined to call b.s. on a movie like Straw Dogs; but I can only admire Peckinpah's willingness to lay all his cards on the table and present the issue in all its complexity with brutal, ruthless honesty. By the end, David may have achieved his personal transcendence into true manliness, but look at the devastating mess he leaves in his wake. There's no visceral triumph in it, even with Hoffman's creepy smile at the end. (And Amy, who seems to resent his weakness in the beginning of the picture, certainly doesn't find herself overjoyed about David's suddenly growing a pair at the end; she's understandably traumatized by the end of the harrowing ordeal.) That's certainly the kind of refreshing honesty about violence that you don't get from the typical macho Hollywood action flick.

By the way, what's this about rumors I'm hearing about Rod Lurie remaking Straw Dogs and also commenting on how "there will be no smiling during rape in my film"?Posted by kenjfuj on 2007-09-01 14:27:00

JJ Says

--Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?

--Yeah, I never thought French Connection was quite the masterpeice it's been acclaimed as either. Terrific movie, has an undeniable power, must have seemed revelatory at the time, but....Dirty Harry has always seemed to me the much better film. The differance is that FC has that Battle Of Algiers influenced documentary realism which can cover a multitude of failings, while DH is more of a classic Hollywood product....

--Of course, considering both John Milius AND Terence Malick worked on the script, no wonder Dirty Harry feels a bit garbled and idealogically confused!

--According to Milius, who seems to have pretty much written the shooting draft, his inspiration was Kurosawa's STRAY DOG. Interesting...Thus making Harry sort've a modern-day Samurai. (an image, of course, which held great appeal to the far right in 20th century Japan at one time, and is probably equally appealing to American conservatives, even if they are'nt consciously aware of it.)

--I've always sensed a bit of The Searchers in there too...and you have to admire the sheer pulpy audaciousness of the idea, that they're going to imagine the law officer mythic enough to take down their stand-in for the Zodiac killer--who at the time represented undiluted, savage evil in America.

--BTW: I always thought Harry's badge toss was an obvious referance to High Noon, and meant basically the same thing: "I'm an honorable man, but this whole system is so rotten now, I don't see how I can keep my honor anymore."

--Oh yeah: The film may be have racist characters, but it is itself not racist. The various black characters, for instance, are just far too real and human for that. The young boy's mother, for instance. Even the black bank robber in the famous scene I qouted above--he and Harry are shown to be on the same level, both warriors, in a sense. It's there in the guy asking Harry, "I gots to know", and in the way Harry answers him--a show of respect between two gunslingers.Posted by Anonymous on 2007-09-01 14:26:00

Craig: I agree that the movie shouldn't be penalized for having won an Oscar (I've gotten to the point where I don't consider an Oscar to be a signifier of very much except the winner's popularity, potential and future employability). "FC" is exciting, no doubt, but it gives me not much to chew on or admire artistically, and I've grown to like and expect that from genre pictures, otherwise why give them two hours of your life?Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-09-01 14:19:00

Friedkin bashing seems a popular sport these days--ever since Peter Biskind offered us the shocking revelation that he's an asshole, or at least was in the 70s. I'm not going to mount a big defense of the guy except to say that I like "The French Connection." It's an exciting police procedural, a chase movie with movement and atmosphere. It was an unconventional choice for the Oscars, I doubt it was consciously aspiring to them, and I don't think it should be demerited in retrospect for winning any.

I think his megaflop "Sorcerer" is an even more interesting (and underrated) film. Yes, Friedkin had the gall to remake "The Wages of Fear," but I find his movie intriguing on its own terms.

Harlan Ellison is the only writer to ever capture how I feel about Friedkin's movies, which would have more impact if I could remember what it was....Posted by Craig on 2007-09-01 14:14:00

I think you're missing a word after "its" in this sentence:

Even on first viewing--as a movie-crazed teenager in 1986, courtesy of VHS--its in the pantheon of great '70s movies struck me as unearned.

Note that the car chase in French Connection begins with a woman pushing a baby carriage and ends with another woman pushing a baby carriage. I doubt Friedkin realized this (so much for his ballyhooed editing), otherwise he would've cut one out, or, if he were savvy, turned the whole thing into a subversive farce.

Dirty Harry is one of my guilty pleasures, but I can't overlook Siegel's dishonesty when taking the focus off Harry to show the killer at work. Had the film remained fixed on Harry, without the audience knowing who the bad guy was or what he was up to, the tone of the film would turn dramatically.Posted by Flickhead on 2007-09-01 10:30:00

The French Connection has been long overdue for a thumping. To think that this film beat The Last Picture Show and even the overrated but still better A Clockwork Orange for best picture shows how the Academy can seldom get it right. Fiddler on the Roof would have even been a better choice, though The French Connection was at least a little better than the bore that was Nicholas and Alexandra.Posted by Edward Copeland on 2007-09-01 07:35:00

Dead on, I think. Much as I admire Friedkin's skill, there's a mix of bluster and trepidation to all his films--a reticence to investigate the morally blurred landscapes Friedkin makes such a showy bother of barging into--that leaves most of them feeling hollow.

"The movie doesn't say, "Here's the dirty truth about you people," but rather, "Look into my eyes, then tell me you don't see yourself"--a distinction that separates hacks from artists." This especially touched me. I think an auteurist critique only goes so far in this instance, though, and would like to suggest an alternate (or, more accurately perhaps, a secondary) explanation for the three film's successes and failures--each film's leading man.

Hackman's a pro's pro if ever there was one, elegant and unfussy even at his showiest, able to limn his characters' deepest drives through the smallest gestures. But it's the type of professionalism--honorable, respectful of his collaborators--that can slide into rote when unchallenged, and I don't really see anything onscreen in The French Connection to suggest that he was. Hackman, even this early in his career, was surely savvy enough to recognize a mechanical series of thrills when he was in one, and accordingly latched on to the brutalizing tone. Just compare his Doyle in The French Connection II; Frankenheimer's mechanics are more wounded and uncertain than Friedkin's, and Hackman modified to them beautifully. Doyle's still rough-and-tumble (to the detriment of the French police operations), but when forced to sweat out his addiction the personal victory expands upon the established character in all the right ways. His self-righteous stubborness gets put to use holding his limbs and hungers in check, and the patience required to sit and let his normal self claw back to the surface is less enlightenment than waiting for the revenge to get cold.

Eastwood, on the other hand, while less of an actor than Hackman, is often more fascinating and conspiratorial. At least since The Beguiled, arguably since the first Leone film, and hell, he was probably up to it on Rawhide but I've never seen an episode to confirm, Eastwood's favorite exercise has been to accept his heroic status as a given only to probe the limits of the audience's bond. There's a detached quality to some of his best performances, of Eastwood standing off to the side of his own character, not with the wink of Cary Grant but the relaxed mien of a research assistant, jotting down verbal responses and pulse rates while the buttons get pushed.

Harry Callahan is almost certainly the most conventionally ingratiating of the characters Eastwood played for Siegel, but most of his attraction still depends upon Eastwood's paradoxical indifference to how he's viewed. Good old-fashioned loner outsider stuff, to be sure, but given relevance by the modern setting (as Matt points out, the civil rights debates in the film were very much current fodder on its release, denying the audience the safe remove of history and metaphor) and Eastwood's distinctly urban angst. Unlike so many movie cops, Callahan wouldn't work in the Old West. He's a hot-dog stand kind of guy, always looking to rub up against his fellow citizens and sneer or shoot, as opportunities warrant. He's as comfortable in the concrete jungle as Arizona sherrif Coogan was cramped and angered.

(As an aside, Eastwood in interviews has always seemed more honest and upfront about the film's right-wing stance than Siegel--though I've not read many interviews with the director, and might be mischaracterizing his views.)

And Straw Dogs has always felt a little apart from Peckinpah's other films. Not in theme, certainly, or lack of troubled, troubling genius. But it's chilly where Peckinpah is usually romantic, pinched where's he's raucously, profanely human. This could be the director responding to the new environment, or modeling the film's geometric rigor on his protagonist's profession. But I think Hoffman has not a little to do with it. Hoffman's not one of my favorites--his hit to miss ratio is pretty shockingly low for "one of our best"--but his notorious perfectionism and bullying of collaborators makes him almost the anti-Hackman; and in this case, I think, for the better.

Hoffman's painstaking process must have bristled against the abused-family dynamic Peckinpah generated on set (not for Hoffman the garrulous give-and-take of an Oates or Pickens), and probably edged the film further along towards its uncompromised destination. David is just so damned unlikable; not so much withdrawn as coldly aloof. As many have pointed out, following Kael, before the extended climax his only moment of joy comes from intellectually thrashing a dinner guest. Which makes his (yes, cool and rational) displays of violence, his bloodied assertion of territory, simultaneously concrete and mysterious, like experiencing deja vu at a scene of horrifying carnage. The journey was clear and the destination inevitable, but we still can't help wondering how the hell we wound up here. No doubt Peckinpah wanted David's final smile to play ambiguously, but I credit Hoffman for, however inadvertently, generating an expression that I suspect played as haunting and unreadable to the director as the rest of us.Posted by Bruce Reid on 2007-09-01 05:11:00